The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  And Louise’s kitchen was almost new. That had been their first priority, to get rid of all that antique junk the place had come with and to put in all new appliances. A side by side refrigerator and a self cleaning oven, even a fancy blender with the motor built right into the counter top. Louise had loved that kitchen with a passion that might have moved another man to jealousy.

  He wondered how it happened that it was there they had found her body. It would have to have been Louise, but why just in the kitchen?

  Yes, of course. The fire. He was being stupid. The fire was supposed to cover everything. A stupid business.

  Did he have any stupid enemies? No, at least not ones who would have thought to murder his wife. All of those were dead.

  But it had to be an enemy of his—who would want to murder Louise? It was all aimed at him somehow, and Louise had merely gotten into the line of fire.

  What was the matter with him? It used to be he could smell trouble, could feel it coming the way some people can feel bad weather. This had caught him totally off his guard.

  Aware that he was in danger of losing control, Guinness took a deep breath, sucking air into his lungs until they ached and then letting it out as slowly as he could. He repeated the process, three, and then four times, until his perceptions narrowed down to the patterns of the water drops on the garage door and the noise of the blood pounding in his ears. It made him feel faintly ill, faintly giddy, the way one did sometimes after coming up out of a chair too fast; but that was better than breaking into angry, hysterical weeping in front of a lawn full of homicide detectives. To hell with them too, his emotions were his own business.

  The sun had dipped low enough to turn the sky a grimy orangeish color above the ragged edging made by the darkened buildings of his neighborhood. With a kind of visual pop the street lamps came on, creating long smears of shadow that ran across the lawn from the feet of the few huddled detectives who remained, like slicks of blackened water.

  “I think I want to get out of here.”

  Peterson was only too eager. He sprang the rear door of his unmarked police car, waving Guinness into the back seat. Settling in, Guinness noticed with distaste that he was behind a cagework grating bolted into place over the driver’s backrest. The back doors didn’t even open from the inside.

  The car pulled out, and he glanced back through the rear window to watch his house recede and darken as they left it behind.

  2

  Guinness’s waitress was much practiced in that art they have of avoiding your eye when you want to ask for something, so he gave up and returned to a close study of his eggs. He had requested them scrambled hard, but what did that mean? At the moment they were hemorrhaging all over his plate. As it cooled, the pale yellowish mass seemed to sweat forth tiny droplets of what was probably cooking oil, giving the impression that it was dying in unspeakable agony.

  What he wanted now was to order another cup of tea, but perhaps it was just as well. With about a third of one of their little containers of ersatz half and half stirred in, his last cup had still the approximate color of dead grass.

  Anyway, for the day ahead he really didn’t want very much on his stomach.

  The physical texture of life without Louise. He had awakened several times during the night, each time feeling cold and peculiarly desolate, as if his bed had been quietly transferred to some moonscape.

  Nothing more than the disruption of established habit. It was just that he wasn’t used to sleeping alone anymore. There was no point in getting melodramatic about trifles; he would have the hang of it again before long.

  Finally the waitress flew by of her own accord, stopping only long enough to slap his check down on the table. She was an enormous, energetic blonde of about forty-five, and as she charged away her buttocks pounded jerkily, like steam pistons under her black rayon skirt.

  An English muffin, orange juice, two scrambled eggs, and a single cup of tea. Two forty-five, plus fifteen cents tax. Guinness slid a precise 15 percent under the rim of his plate, picking up the tiny paper receipt form between his first and middle fingers as he rose from the table.

  Passing from the coffee shop, past a busboy’s cart burdened down with clotted breakfast dishes, he took a few steps down a corridor that led in one direction outdoors to the swimming pool and in the other to the main lobby, and pushed open the door to the men’s room. As it usually did when he ate away from home, breakfast left him feeling slightly sticky.

  There was a balance scale in the men’s room—“your true weight, no springs”—so Guinness climbed up on the little platform, dropped in his nickel, and watched the numbered band spin around until it came to rest at just a shade over one hundred and eighty-six and a half pounds.

  Well hell, he was fully dressed and it was right directly after breakfast, so at six-one it wasn’t a calamity.

  He washed his hands with the tiny rectangular wafer of soap that he found half dissolved on the edge of the sink and splashed a little cold water in his face, and, as he was patting it dry with a paper towel, he looked up at his reflection in the mirror and frowned.

  Bluish gray eyes, hair that over the years had darkened from red to brown, a few dim freckles dusted over the bridge of a rather blunt nose—at thirty-eight still the face of a slightly seedy Eagle Scout.

  Useful when you wanted to play the harmless bucolic from America’s heartland—possibly having such a face had once or twice saved his life—but not a face that reflected much about its owner. It always gave Guinness the uncomfortable feeling that he was conducting his life from behind a mask.

  Which, of course he was, and had been for as long as he could remember. How else could he have gotten by?

  But you can’t fool everyone. In the back yard behind their house was a small, hypochondriacal maple tree that was always threatening to come down with some exotic new deficiency disease if you weren’t out there every minute pounding spikes of plant food down among its roots, and during the winter, when all the leaves were gone, there were almost always a few tacky looking birds sitting disconsolately in its naked branches. It didn’t take very long before Louise decided that they had to be starving to death, although how a bird would contrive to starve in the San Francisco Bay Area Guinness couldn’t begin to imagine. Anyway, she went right out to buy a five pound bag of birdseed.

  By turns they would each go out in the morning and sprinkle handfuls of birdseed around the base of the maple tree. At first, the instant either of them came out, all the birds would flutter up into the telephone wires to wait until the coast was clear. But eventually, with Louise, they would be satisfied with the next branch up, just out of reach, and finally they would come down to the ground while she was still outside. Had she survived another season they would probably have been fighting each other to eat the stuff out of her hand.

  But toward Guinness their feelings never changed. The second he opened the back door, it was into the telephone wires. You don’t ever really get to reform, and birds know a predator when they see one.

  In the lobby there was a cutesy clock over the front desk, with the numbers replaced by the letters of the hotel’s name and two dots to separate the two words they made. The minute hand was between the D and the A, and the hour rested firmly over the H, making it about seven minutes after nine.

  The police, in the person of their sympathetic Detective Peterson, had arranged to pick him up at 10:00 A.M.; thus there wouldn’t really be time enough to take a cab back across town to the campus, where his car was still waiting for him in the faculty parking lot. Still, he felt the need of something to keep his mind occupied, so he lifted a copy of the San Mateo Times from the top of a stack of them on the front desk, dropped a quarter in its place, and sat down in one of the two rather moth eaten light gray wing chairs that stood on either side of the main entrance, facing into the lobby like genteel, disapproving sentinels.

  A quick rip through didn’t turn up any mention of the fire or the discovery of a body,
which was disturbing. Belmont was a small town by relative standards, where disasters were rare enough to be reported with something almost amounting to civic pride, and a good death by fire would normally have been worth at least two columns on the front page of the local news.

  But the editor was very likely to be Creon’s Rotary brother or something and, in any case, more dependent on the good will of the fuzz than would be usual in Los Angeles or even San Jose. The paper’s silence could only mean that the police were sitting on the story.

  It was easy to imagine why; they hadn’t quite made up their minds and they wanted time. Time to decide how to play it. It wouldn’t do to start shouting homicide until you were absolutely positive, and perhaps not until you had someone to collar for it.

  If he worked it right, Creon could come out of this case looking like a hero. And like something less if he blew it.

  Guinness closed the newspaper, refolding and smoothing it down against his knee. He closed his eyes for several seconds and tried to reestablish himself somewhere over the tumult of thought and feeling, to slow things down and bring them into some kind of order.

  It didn’t seem fair somehow. It was too much all at once, too many demands from too many different directions. Out there somewhere was somebody who planned to kill him, who had already killed Louise, and Guinness would have to stay on his toes if he wanted to do that somebody full justice. Merely to keep on breathing would require his undivided attention, and in the meantime he would have to fence with the god damned police.

  And just where was it written that there should be no time to mourn? After all, his wife, who had not yet been dead for twenty-four hours, had some small claim. As it was, if he stopped to think too much about her he might end up dead himself, and when finally there would be time—if ever there would be time—well, probably by then he’d be used to it. The strangeness would have worn off, and it would be too late. You do, in fact, get used to it. You can get used to anything.

  It wasn’t fair, to Louise or to himself. Because he also needed time, time to say a decent goodbye. People had a right to be human beings and to suffer in peace through their sense of loss, but apparently it had been decided somewhere that the Guinnesses should constitute a special case.

  Poor Louise. He couldn’t say he had provided her with much of a husband, but probably every fresh widower thought something like that. Widower—funny sort of word, applying with equal force to Bluebeard, Raymond M. Guinness, Henry VIII, and Sidney, 1st Earl of Godolphin.

  Still, he couldn’t expect to get off scot free. Wasn’t feeling guilty, after all, a part of the pattern?

  And there had been enough to merit a little guilt; it wasn’t precisely as if he were martyring himself on the cross of his own sensibility.

  Just for instance, it wasn’t as if their marriage had been founded upon the Rock of Truth.

  Not that he had lied, precisely, but one can easily lie by omission. There had been so much silence.

  Of course, One couldn’t come right out with an exhaustive history of one’s lurid past, and one didn’t choose to lie. So One simply did not discuss some things. Not entirely honest perhaps, but then how many successful marriages could be built on that kind of honesty? What kinds of people would even want to try?

  What the hell, people didn’t have to ooze through one another like rainwater through a plaster roof in order to be content. Other kinds of unions were possible besides the hideousness of the American happy marriage, and no one would suffer if the two of them hadn’t contrived to be Ozzie and Harriet.

  Live for the moment, that was the plan, and try to create the impression that you did not have too many specific memories. Why should the past have been different from the present? Why indeed?

  There had been, he remembered, a cigarette machine in the coffee shop, just opposite the cashier’s desk, and at that moment Guinness was dying for a cigarette. A cigarette—yes, he decided, the very thing. He hadn’t had a cigarette in over four years, not since Louise had wheedled him into giving them up.

  “Come on,” she had whispered, her breath warm against his ear as she put her arms around his neck, sliding into his lap from the arm of his reading chair. “It won’t be so very terrible. I won’t let you suffer. We’ll find other ways to gratify your base animal nature.” And she had been as good as her word.

  So he had stopped. Thus easily can one yield to the preposterous notion that one might live long enough to make lung cancer something to worry about. At any rate, events had cured him of that illusion.

  Guinness reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his change. Two quarters, three dimes, and a nickel plus about seven pennies. Plenty.

  Still, he didn’t get up from his chair, and after a moment he returned the coins to his pocket. It could wait. It would have been like a betrayal.

  Louise, poor Louise. Louise and the domestic virtues. Always so worried about his health, and then she had been the one to end up dead. Poor baby. He wondered out of how many years he had cheated her.

  She had made it the business of her life to see to it that his clothes were pressed and his health sound, that he was comfortable and content and well loved. He had had everything he could want from her, even friendship—and the touch of her hand to lift the stray wisp of hair away from his brow when he was unhappy and would not say why. She wouldn’t ask him. She would be content to understand without understanding.

  But had it been enough for her? It had occurred to Guinness to wonder from time to time. It occurred to him now, to wonder and to hope that somehow it had been. Louise was dead and there would be no more time now, no more chances, so he hoped she had been happy for their five years.

  Perhaps not happy, perhaps not that. Because who in this world gets to be happy? One mustn’t ask for the moon.

  But he hoped she had had whatever it was that she had been after. There would be no more of anything now, so all he could do was to hope.

  Guinness glanced up at the wall clock over the front desk and checked it against his own watch. They agreed on nine twenty-eight.

  He was to identify the body that morning and make his statement. Why in that order? he wondered. Perhaps they had some idea of shaking him up, of jolting him enough to start a few cracks in his story.

  What the hell for, didn’t they have any more imagination than that? Aside from the policeman’s treasured axiom that the husband is always your best suspect, nothing pointed to him.

  And it had been a long, long time since the sight of anybody’s cadaver had managed to reduce him to quivering helplessness. No, it was a little late in the day for that.

  It would be amusing to see how they would try breaking him down. He could imagine the scenario: being played off between Good Cop and Bad Cop, between his very own oh so sympathetic young Detective Peterson and Creon the Unkind. After a few hours of the sergeant’s rough tongue he would be expected to come all unglued and open up to his “friend,” who of course would see everything entirely from his point of view. You could watch it five nights a week on reruns of Dragnet.

  Perhaps not really very amusing, but at least he would know how to behave, having already been through it once before. Not in Belmont of course, or even in the United States. In Yugoslavia, in the summer of 1965.

  An apparently insignificant party official had suddenly fallen down dead, pitched right over onto the sidewalk on his way to lunch, the way a puppet will when suddenly you let go of the strings. It was small wonder, actually, because a 9 mm slug had just entered his brain about an inch above and behind his right ear. When they dug it out, it was resting against the back of his left eye, and it had done quite a lot of damage on its way across.

  Suddenly the whole district was alive with police in olive uniforms, sweeping the area for anybody who didn’t look as if he had been born on the spot. They picked Guinness up as he stepped out of an elevator in a building across the street from where the body had collapsed on the pavement. In the same building they found a
9 mm rifle, with a shooting stand and a pair of neatly folded black leather gloves resting on the ledge of a second story window. It looked pretty bad.

  They measured his hands and found that the gloves were a size and a half too small, but they grilled him for two days straight anyway. Who was he? What was he doing in that building? What was he doing in Belgrade? Who was he really? On and on. Finally they decided that there wasn’t any evidence, that probably he didn’t have anything to do with their precious assassination, and that they didn’t dare hold him any longer unless they were prepared to go the whole distance and notify his embassy that he was being officially detained in connection with the murder of Janik Shevliskin. So they let him go. The gloves had saved him, and the fact that his story hadn’t melted under pressure.

  The gloves had been a last minute inspiration. He always liked to leave a red herring of some kind against just such an emergency, and he had picked them up in a Parisian department store an hour and ten minutes before his train was due to leave. The label on the inside indicated that the gloves had been made in Poland, which was a nice touch.

  The gloves he had actually worn to shoot with were cheapie plastic jobs, the kind that come on rolls of a hundred, and had been flushed, one at a time, down the handiest john.

  When he got back to London, he told the British that if they wanted anybody else axed in Yugoslavia they could find themselves another boy. This time had been a trifle close, thank you, and he couldn’t risk being arrested twice.

  The paper was still over his knee when Peterson came through the lobby doors. He walked about a quarter of the way into the room before he stopped and began looking around, turning back toward the entrance as Guinness cleared his throat significantly.

  “Good morning, Detective Peterson. You’re early.”

  Peterson smiled suddenly, as if caught in some vague indiscretion, which perhaps he had been, and put out his hand to shake as Guinness rose from his chair. Probably there was no tactful way to greet a man whom you are taking to see his freshly dead wife.